Is he really? Dead? I wouldn’t be so sure.
The shaking was growing stronger. Johann reached for the books on the table as if they were his lifeline, but he couldn’t grasp them and they crashed to the floor. The books couldn’t help him now; not even they could tell him more about the insane knight with the eyes of an angel, which had once gazed at him from a basin filled with blood. That had been in Nuremberg, when Tonio had tried to sacrifice him for some kind of dark offering.
Johann closed his eyes and felt cold sweat on his forehead. He heard loud crashing and breaking, and it took him a while to realize that he was lying on the wooden floorboards and that it had been his body crashing to the ground. He must have tried to brace himself against the table and had gone down—table, chair, books, and all. Johann opened his mouth, saliva dribbling from his lips like a rabid dog. The words came haltingly.
“Gilles . . . Tonio . . . cursed . . . pact . . .”
Johann thought of the bright young boy who’d shook the hand of a magician long ago. A boy who’d gained glory in the course of his life, and knowledge and wealth, but who now, many years on, had to pay for it.
There was no escape.
With this final thought, he blacked out.
“What?” Karl gaped at Greta. “The doctor is going to die? How . . . how do you know?”
Greta was trembling, trying with all her might to compose herself. She had always known that this day would come—she couldn’t carry this terrible secret around with her forever.
“I don’t mean to frighten you, Karl,” she said. “Maybe I’m mistaken. But I don’t think I am. I saw it clearly.”
Karl gave a desperate laugh. “What do you mean, you saw it? In your dreams? I don’t believe in dreams—I am certain they are nothing but illusions.”
“I saw it in the palm of his hand. Do you understand?”
“Do you . . . do you mean you can read in someone’s hand if they’re going to die?” Karl turned pale. “I always thought that was nothing but hocus-pocus. You simply tell people what they want to hear. And besides—you haven’t read anyone’s palm in years.”
Greta sighed. “And now you know why. Because it is just too awful sometimes.”
She’d been carrying this dark secret around with her for a long time now. She had been young when Johann had introduced her to chiromancy, the art of reading palms. The long, forked Life line that ends above the thumb, the mysterious Fate line, the Heart line, the Mount of Venus, the so-called simian crease, and more. In the beginning she had enjoyed it, but one day three winters ago, something had happened.
She had seen a person’s imminent death in their palm.
It had felt like steady pulsations, and for the briefest moment the Life line had glowed; then something had covered the hand, something like the black wing of a bird. And Greta knew with certainty that this person would soon die.
At first she had told herself that she’d only imagined it, that it was part of the melancholy that befell her from time to time. But then they spent the winter in Erfurt, in Thuringia. A young woman had asked to have her palm read, and Greta had obliged; the black wing had appeared once more. One week later, the woman had fallen ill with a fever and died.
The black wings.
“The doctor has become more and more sullen in recent months,” she said slowly. “You must have noticed that something is bothering him. And then there’s the strange shaking that he’s trying to hide from us.”
Karl nodded. “Perhaps it’s the alcohol. He’s been drinking a lot lately, mostly in secret.”
“Whatever it is—he won’t talk to us. So I went to his bed one night to look at his palm. He only ever takes off his gloves when he sleeps.” She looked at Karl closely. “You never told me why he’s missing the little finger on his right hand, and his left eye.”
Karl didn’t reply, and Greta continued.
“When I picked up his hand, I felt something. It was something dark, evil! And do you know what else was strange? His lines were barely recognizable, as if they had faded, as if . . . as if they were gradually disappearing. I have never seen anything like it before.” Greta pressed her lips together. “And then it happened. The Life line lit up in a dark purple, and then a black shadow—like the wing of a bird—swept across it. And I felt the same throbbing as with the others before. And they all died a short while later.” She closed her eyes. “I should never have done it, but now it’s too late.”
“I . . . I think you’re mistaken,” Karl replied weakly.
But Greta could tell that he was keeping something from her. Terrible things had happened back in Nuremberg—so terrible that her consciousness had suppressed most memories of that night. The few recollections that remained were blurred, as if she were looking through a dull lens. Sometimes, in her dreams, she saw herself lying naked on a stone altar. A choir of voices chanted a sinister litany; a knife flashed in the darkness.
O Mephistopheles, O Satanas.
“Karl, you have to tell me what happened back in Nuremberg,” urged Greta. “The doctor said someone gave me a potion that made me pass out. What kind of a potion? It’s almost like my whole childhood has been erased. Johann is keeping something
